Google has announced they will be sending out invitations to 100,000 Google Wave beta testers this week and the final release is predicted by the end of the year. Google Wave promises to do for desktop communications what the iPhone did for mobile devices – simplifying our lives by combining many popular activities on one platform. It looks as though Google is eager to push online communication to the next evolutionary step.
For those who don’t have time to sit through the 80 minute YouTube presentation from the Google I/O Conference, here is a summary of what to expect.
A new paradigm for message documents (called a “waves”):
- Message trees in a threaded, message board format.
- Ability to invite other participants for real time chats within the same document.
- Drag and drop file sharing and group editing of image details.
- Collaborative wiki style editing with a playback feature for users who want to see the document change history.
Third party gadget and automated “robot” extensions for extra functionality such as:
- Real time group collaboration on Google maps.
- Voice and video.
- RSS feed management.
- On-the-fly language translation.
- Complex real time games
Some nice usability features including:
- No more paging through lists of emails. The application simply keeps feeding more waves into your browser window – an infinitely scrolling list effect.
- Advanced search and retrieval functions.
- Context sensitive auto-correcting spell checking (ex. “I like been soup” will flag as an error).
- Heavy use of AJAX interfaces to give the whole application an elegant flavor.
In a bold move, the Google Wave project has dropped support for all versions of Internet Explorer. Apparently it was too difficult to adapt the product to run on Microsoft’s outdated web rendering engine. Users will need to install a Chrome Frame plugin for IE or else switch to Chrome, Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4. This could either deter adoption of Wave or else spell real trouble for Microsoft in the modern era browser wars.
